Transcript: Bill Gates, U.S. Rep. spar over H-1B visas

In Washington, D.C., today, Bill Gates testified before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, calling again for Congress to reform the H-1B visa program that Microsoft and other companies use to bring foreign workers to the U.S.

Here’s an excerpt from the text of his prepared remarks (PDF, 20 pages).

Congress’s failure to pass high-skilled immigration reform has exacerbated an already grave situation. For example, the current base cap of 65,000 H-1B visas is arbitrarily set and bears no relation to the U.S. economy’s demand for skilled professionals. …

As a result, many U.S. firms, including Microsoft, have been forced to locate staff in countries that welcome skilled foreign workers to do work that could otherwise have been done in the United States, if it were not for our counterproductive immigration policies. Last year, for example, Microsoft was unable to obtain H-1B visas for one-third of the highly qualified foreign-born job candidates that we wanted to hire.

If we increase the number of H-1B visas that are available to U.S. companies, employment of U.S. nationals would likely grow as well. For instance, Microsoft has found that for every H-1B hire we make, we add on average four additional employees to support them in various capacities. Our experience is not unique. A recent study of technology companies in the S&P 500 found that, for every H-1B visa requested, these leading U.S. technology companies increased their overall employment by five workers.

The Microsoft chairman’s assertions didn’t go unchallenged. The question-and-answer period included a lively exchange on the topic between Gates and U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican.

Rohrabacher: If we bring in more people from the outside, realizing that we’re bringing the most talented people from other countries, will it not hurt those countries? And will it also not depress the wages in our own country that people like yourself would have to pay your employees in order to get quality people or in order to train people within our own society?

Gates: No, no. These top people are going to be hired. It’s just a question of what country they do their work in.

Rohrabacher: I’m really not talking about top people here. You know … there’s a lot of other people in society rather than just the top people. It’s the B and C students that fight for our country and kept it free so that people like yourself would have the opportunity that you’ve had. Those people, whether or not they get displaced by the top people from another country is not our goal. Our goal isn’t to replace the job of the B students with A students from India, because those B students deserve to have good jobs and high-paying jobs.

Gates: That’s right, and what I’ve said here is that when we bring in these world-class engineers, we create jobs around them. … The B and C students are the ones who get those jobs around these top engineers. And if these top engineers are forced to work, say, in India, we will hire the B and C students from India to work around them.

Rohrabacher: But according to BusinessWeek, almost 150,000 computer programmers have lost their job in this country since the year 2000. Now, my reading of all of this is that there are plenty of people out there to hire but people want to have the top quality people from India and China and elsewhere, and they’re willing to have these 150,000 American computer programmers just go unemployed.

Gates: Actually, BusinessWeek doesn’t do surveys. I think you’re referring to a quote in BusinessWeek from an Urban Institute study …

Rohrabacher: That’s what I said, according to BusinessWeek, yeah.

Gates: It’s not according to BusinessWeek. There was a study that a group at Urban Institute did that was deeply flawed in terms of how it defined what an engineer is. When we say that these jobs are going begging, we’re in business every day. We’re not kidding about it. These jobs are going begging, and the result is that in a competitive economy …

Rohrabacher: You’d have to raise wages.

Gates: No, wages are —

Rohrabacher: If a job’s going begging, you raise wages, now in a —

Gates: No, it’s not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very, very high-paying jobs. And we are hiring as many of these people as we can.

Rohrabacher: Well, let me give you one example —

At that point, committee chairman Bart Gordon interrupted to say that Rohrabacher’s time was up, and Rohrabacher suggested that he and Gates continue the discussion at a reception during the evening.